This past Black Friday and the Thursday preceding it, 60 percent of online shoppers in the U.S. visited the websites of major retailers like Amazon on their mobile device. That’s according to IBM Watson Trend, a division of the multinational enterprise company that analyzes online shopping data, which also said 40 percent of online shoppers completed their purchase using a smartphone or tablet.
“Both on the hits side and on the sales side, the smartphone is outpacing tablets, and smartphone shoppers dominate,” said Justin Norwood, a product strategist for IBM, in an interview with Investor’s Business Daily. “It seems like this is the breakout year for mobile optimization, and retailers have invested a considerable amount in their mobile sites.”
Likewise, Adobe’s Adobe Digital Index, a system that measures the majority of online transactions involving 100 of the top retailers in the U.S., found 37 percent of online traffic this past Thursday and Friday came from users on mobile devices.
Although we don’t have access to Canadian stats, it’s likely the numbers observed by IBM in the U.S. are similar and perhaps even higher here north of the border. Earlier in the month, Yahoo published a report that said two-thirds of Canadians consider their smartphone their primary computer. This, in combination with the fact that between 78 and 88 percent of Canadian postpaid wireless subscribers are on smartphone plans — a number that’s higher here in Canada than in the U.S — means most Canadians have embraced smartphones and have done so passionately.
Ultimately, this means by this time next year we’ll likely be able to say the majority of online shopping in North America will have been done via a mobile device.
[source]Investor’s Business Daily[/source]
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